March, 2006

Best of the Blogs: Bertram and Brighouse on Schmidtz

At the Crooked Timber group blog, two philosophers, Chris Bertram of the University of Bristol and Harry Brighouse of the University of Wisconsin, band together to register their disagreement with David Schmidtz’s lead essay in a sophisticated post that we have reproduced here.

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Inequality Elsewhere

The Wall Street Journal’s Econoblog is now featuring a debate on inequality that can profitably be read alongside Cato Unbound’s discussion. Two economists, Heather Boushey of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and Russell Roberts of George Mason University, hash it out. Their illuminating exchange illustrates the complexity of the inequality debate in terms [...]

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Which Inequalities Are Ours to Arrange? A Response to Schmidtz

Picking up where David Schmidtz’s lead essay ends, Cato Institute Senior Fellow Tom Palmer argues that a common line of reasoning used to justify the authority of the state to rearrange the unequal distribution of wealth is based on a mistake. The kind of equality that matters, Palmer argues, is the “equal right of every person to excercise choice over his or her own person.” The inequalities that emerge from the voluntary interaction of persons excercising that right are not “ours” to reconfigure.

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Why Care About Equality? A Response to Schmidtz*

“When Jeremy Bentham first suggested that the pains and pleasures of an African should count as much as the happiness of an English person,” philosopher Peter Singer writes, “this view had radical implications, for slavery was still legal in the British colonies. Today, the suggestion that the pain of a nonhuman animal might count as much as the pain of a member of our own species is still radical. That is why this sense of equality remains important.”

Read: Why Care About Equality? A Response to Schmidtz*

When Inequality Matters

“Everyone cares about inequality. Caring about inequality, though, is not enough to make inequality matter,” writes political philosopher David Schmidtz in the lead essay of this month’s Cato Unbound. “Unless we have the right sorts of reasons to care, equality does not matter, at least not in the way justice matters. So, why care about inequality?” Drawing on his illuminating new book, Elements of Justice, Schmidtz lucidly clarifies which inequalities matter, and why, in a world where our fellow citizens are partners in a cooperative system of joint production, not competitors in a race.

Read: When Inequality Matters